adw1984

On 3/15/2018 at 1:51 PM, bluefish_dist said:

I don't do washes that are exclusively sugar, but do sugar based washes.   

Sugar washes do need something for buffering.  Calcium carbonate works.  You are correct that rum gets some of its buffering from the molasses.   I find with my water if I add citric and cc at equal parts by volume it will get my ph close for pitching.   This allows you to add a lot of cc for buffering if needed.  Ph will drop and even crash if you are not careful.  I pitch at 5.2-5.4 and try and hold it to low 4's when fermenting.  

I also now pitch at higher rates than recommended along with slightly higher nutrient additions.   I am above the top recommended rates for both yeast and nutrients.   I took a couple ferments from 1.01 to .997 by simply adding a little more yeast.   Other ferments needed both more yeast and nutrients.   Really depends on water and mash bill.   My vodka has some grain in it and it uses 1/2-1/3 of what I add to the higher content sugar washes.   It also finishes in 3 days   

Mixing/degassing has been reported to help, but it sounds like you are already doing that.   Personally I have found the right mixes to get full attenuation, but it was a combination of correct ph, for both pitch and fermentation, the right amount of yeast and nutrients.   

 

Appreciated!  What kind of pitch rate are you usually looking at?

On 3/15/2018 at 1:59 PM, Northern Waters said:

We worked through a lot of similar challenges on a small scale and finally got a pure cane sugar to work and complete in four days.  We tried a variety of yeasts and nutrients, and determined that for pure sugar a LOT of nutrient was necessary.  Here is our program - you can scale up from there:

Heat 25 Gallons Water (5.0 pH) to 125*F
Add 75-LBS Sugar
Add additional cold water to cool the wash and bring total volume to 40-gallons
Hydrate 90 Grams Fermentis SafSpirit C-70 yeast at 100*F for 20-minutes
Nutrients - 250 Grams DAP & 250 Grams Fermentis Prop-Aide
Pitch at 95* F and hold ferment at 90*F

On the second day the pH drops to near 4.0 so we need to adjust it back up to 5.5.  Once we get about 1/3 - 1/2 ferment I add additional DAP.

For us, so far so good.  We have done this with and without dunder with the same results.

Good luck!

 

 

Thanks for the advice!  I've never used the C-70, does that ferment out neutral at that temp, or do you get off flavors?  We are not distilling this product, so I probably wouldn't be fermenting higher than 80 degrees to avoid that with our yeast.  This will probably make it take longer than 4 days.  Are you using calcium carbonate to adjust that pH after day 2?  And what is dunder.  Thanks!

Hey all,

I'm new to this forum and not a distiller.  I wasn't able to find the answer I'm looking for, although I suspect that may have to do with some of the lingo on this side of the industry.  I am a beer brewer by trade, and have recently been hired by a non-brewery/non-distillery company to do all cane sugar ferments.  I'm not overly familiar with the process, but I assume most of fermentation rules apply.  I've been finding that our ferments with cane sugar are very slow, and will stall out at 25% attenuation.  We are currently using white wine yeast, which I know in some cases can be pH intolerant at lower levels. Our yeast pitch rate is at 1.25 mil/mL/plato,  I've been doing staggered nutrient additions with Fermaid, leaning towards the high end of recommended grams/bbl, but our ferments are still very slow, and producing a lot of acetaldehyde.  We've been aerating, which levels I've tried to increase, but that hasn't seemed to help.  I've been trying to find info on making rum, since that seems to be closest to the kind of fermentation we need to be doing, minus the molasses.

I guess I'm wondering what I can do to speed this fermentation up and clean up off flavors.  I'd like to target no more than 10 days to end of fermentation.  I also need to find a way to buffer the pH so the yeast doesn't stall out.  I don't know if molasses provides that, I've considered using calcium carbonate or baking soda.  Any guidance would be appreciated.  In trouble shooting the production process here, I think we need to mimic rum or vodka fermentation, assuming you can get a clean ferment that way.

Thanks All!